I never asked for changes. I trust the authors in their sense of how the gameplay should evolve, and accept new gameplay changes with enthusiasm. But one thing from the latest FFF #442 somewhat disappointed me. Even up to the point where I start thinking of whether I want to continue playing this game.
@Klonan wrote:
While I agree that asteroid quality mechanics simplified a part of the middle-end game, I'm largely disagreeing that asteroid quality recycling was a gameplay exploit.We don't want to be fun killers, but it just makes any other approach to quality obsolete. So in 2.1 placing Quality modules in the asteroid reprocessing recipes is disallowed.
First of all, this mechanics was not for free. You have to do a lot of things until you are able to build well efficient space platform production of enough amounts of quality raw materials from asteroid.
Usually, I build such spaceship when I already managed to open all base techs. Which is not an easy thing to do by itself. It's not something you can do in the beginning of the game. And building a well-designed "space casino" was also a joy chellenge.
And while the space casinos eventually give you notable amounts of high quality raw materials, these are just based raw materials allowing you of making only base legendary items. Anything planet-specific still requires normal upcycling designs.
Space casinos do not obsolete other approaches. They just making middle-end game slightly easier, but does not obsolete the challenge entirely. And I always felt about this alternative as a joyful option rather than exploit.
The second argument is what other alternatives do we really have in place of space platform quality recycling? Making large arrays of repetitive upcycling factories that are shifting steel/iron chests back and forth? Well, that's feasible, but it's kind of weird from my personal taste.
What's more important, that feels like a grind. Which Factorio game design always tries to avoid.
On top of that, Space Age has a strong design lean toward building relatively compact factories. I know that Factorio slogan is that the "Factory must grow". But the Space Age provided alternative option in the end game: the Factorio must shrink and probably for the best. And personally I like this idea very much. I like relatively compact, but very well thought designs.
Removing asteroid quality recycling mechanics somewhat contradicts with this stance. Without this, everything else could be compact, but not the base quality items. Now we are facing that we would have to grind them without clear alternatives.
And last, but not least. Speaking of the higher quality items, in fact you need about finite amount of them. This argument sounds a little bit strange, but this stems from the fact that producing higher quality science packs is somewhat suboptimal. The only thing where you need legendary items are the factory building blocks themselves. You need to produce just some amount of building parts to build a factory capable in making enough portions of all other normal-quality science packs except Promethium. And the Promethium science packs are limited by the game engine UPS performance anyway.
Therefore, the end game base would require just some specific fixed number of legendary items. Anything else is not needed on a regular basis. And hence the large factory of such items eventually becomes not needed too. We will not through raw resources into them infinitely. At some point of the gameplay they just becomes abandoned.
The entire quality items production is somewhat finite Factorio challenge. So, why enforcing the player to grind specific part of them?
That said, I agree that a part of the community didn't like asteroid quality recycling from the beginning. And I understand the desirability to remove this mechanics. But there are another community members that liked this mechanics very much.
And since you already introduced it in Factorio 2.0, and some people relaying on it, I suggest to at least give the players an option: to enable or disable this mechanics in the game start settings. Maybe some of the Steam Achievements could be enabled or disabled also depending on this checkbox.
To conclude, there are people who don't like "space casinos", and those who liked them very very much.
But please, please don't remove it entirely. Leave us an option. I believe it would be the most fair decision.
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